Twitter Pseudotrack

I have been a Twitter user since earlier this year but I have been aware of the service since about a year before. I initially didn’t get the concept of Twitter and the idea of following people and posting your own 140 character tweets. I soon noticed that I would regularly visit certain people’s Twitter profile to see what they were up to. I then realized it was time to join. Irish techie Datalore gave me the tip to use Google Talk, or more broadly XMPP (Jabber) , to post and received updates from Twitter. Another user Bwana posted a video about this Twitter usage strategy. This is where I learned about “track”. Track essentially allows you to receive updates whenever a particular word is mentioned.

Twitter was great in the first few months of my use however Twitter soon started to see scalability issues after the large influx of users. Downtime of services and Twitter as a whole began to increase and the infamous fail whale began popping up more often. In a response Twitter disabled many of its services including track and some XMPP functionality. 

I then decided to reimplement track over XMPP with a little PHP and a cron job. The basic concept of the script is to import the RSS from the Summize API, check for new tweets (since_id comes in handy for that) then send them to the XMPPHP class which send the tweets to my XMPP server every five or so minutes. Along with the service Ping.fm to post, this is how I now use Twitter until everything is working again.

Update Literally one hour after I finished writing the script a came across an article about a service called Twitterspy that now does the same thing. Twitterspy is a great way to bring back the much loved “track” in XMPP and if anyone is interested I suggest you check it out. However, I still will probably still use my script because I my tests it has the advantage in speed, which is a necessity for me and the reason I wrote the script instead of using the web interface.

I also added a script that uses Twitter’s API to poll for updates from people that I am following. Twitter’s only remaining XMPP feature available to the general user base “disappeared” after the iPhone 3G launch.